Mozilla 1.0 Released!

by MOZILLA.ORG| MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - June 5, 2002 - Mozilla.org, the organization that coordinates Mozilla open-source development and provides services to assist the Mozilla community, today announced the release of Mozilla 1.0, the first major-version public release of the Mozilla software. A full-fledged browser suite based on the latest Internet standards as well as a cross-platform toolkit, Mozilla 1.0 is targeted at the developer community and enables the creation of Internet-based applications. Mozilla 1.0 was developed in an open source environment and built by harnessing the creative power of thousands of programmers and tens of thousands of testers on the Internet, incorporating their best enhancements.

Built on the Gecko layout engine, Mozilla 1.0 is cross-platform and integrates a core set of applications that allow users to access the capabilities of the Web, including a web browser, an email reader and a chat client. Gecko is the core browser component in Mozilla 1.0 and was developed as part of the mozilla.org open source project; it is freely available for inclusion in third party products. Mozilla 1.0 uses Gecko to deliver the most advanced, standards-compliant browser across platforms; the ease of embedding Gecko brings the same power to desktop applications as well as devices. The release of Mozilla 1.0 signals a new level of compatibility and maturity of the programming interfaces provided by Gecko, and paves the way for the arrival of new Gecko-based products.

In addition, Mozilla 1.0 is a cross-platform toolkit for developing Internet-based applications. By offering a set of components that can be used in a wide range of applications, are all open source, free of charge and have been tested through their use in Mozilla 1.0's end-user applications, Mozilla 1.0 enables developers to build applications for a cross-platform, network-centric world. Mozilla 1.0 also expands the range of developers who can write complex applications since Mozilla's architecture enables the creation of such complex applications by building upon the same technologies that are used to create web content. For instance, Gecko displays web content on the user's screen and parses and renders HTML and XML content, and this ability to understand and display HTML and XML is valuable in numerous applications beyond the browser. In addition, Mozilla's cross-platform component implementation, Mozilla's cross-platform XML-based user-interface development technology ("XUL"), its networking libraries, its ECMAScript (JavaScript) implementation, and its security and encryption libraries are all part of the Mozilla 1.0 cross-platform toolkit for application development.

"Mozilla.org is excited about releasing the Mozilla 1.0 code and development tools to the open source community, and providing developers with the resources they need to freely create and view the presentation of their content and data on the Web," said Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler at mozilla.org. "As the browser has become the main interface between users and the Web over the past several years, the goal of the Mozilla project is to innovate and enable the creation of standards-compliant technology to keep content on the Web open. As more and more programmers and companies are embracing Mozilla as a strategic technology, Mozilla 1.0 signals the advent of even further dissemination and adoption of open source and standards-based software across the Web."

"The Mozilla project has quietly become a key building block in the open source infrastructure. In addition to the open source Mozilla browser and the Netscape 7.0 browser, the Mozilla toolkit has been used to create additional browsers for platforms such as Linux and Mac OS X, instant messaging clients such as Chatzilla and the cross-platform Jabber client, and software development tools such as ActiveState's Komodo IDE," said Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. "Moreover, there are over 70 distinct projects hosted at mozdev.org, the community site for Mozilla derivatives. This industry-wide momentum ought to be considered a major success in anyone's book."

"The release of Mozilla 1.0 represents a huge milestone for the free software community. From browser technology to software development tools, the Mozilla project has had an enormous impact on open source development," said Nat Friedman, Vice President of Product Development at Ximian Inc. "Most importantly, Mozilla 1.0 is a key part of an industrial-strength open source desktop."

"The launch of Mozilla 1.0 is a key event for embedders across the Web, it gives us a stable platform to develop upon in addition to guaranteed APIs to build applications with," added Philip Langdale, Mozilla interfacing code maintainer for the Galeon web browser project. "We would like to congratulate the entire mozilla.org team for producing such an outstanding product, as key open source projects including Galeon would not have reached this level of quality or maturity without their hard work."

By virtue of embedding Gecko, Mozilla 1.0 and products based on Mozilla code support more web standards, more deeply, more consistently across more platforms than any others. Mozilla 1.0 features full support for HTML 4.0, XML 1.0, Resource Description Framework (RDF), Cascading Style Sheets level 1 (CSS1), and the W3C Document Object Model level 1 (DOM1). Mozilla 1.0 also has the industry's best support for Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 (CSS2), the Document Object Model Level 2 (DOM2), and XHTML. Standards support also includes XML data exchange and manipulation of XML documents with SOAP 1.1, XSLT, XPath 1.0, and FIXptr, as well as support for display of mathematical equations using MathML. Finally, it features a solid foundation of support for data transport protocols (HTTP, FTP, and SSL/TLS), multilingual character data (Unicode), graphics (GIF, JPEG, PNG and MNG) and the latest version of the world's most popular scripting language, JavaScript 1.5.

Further, Mozilla has been designed for easy localization into languages other than English, and localized versions of Mozilla 1.0 will be available in the following languages (with more to follow): Asturian, Chinese, Dutch, Estonian, Galician, German, Georgian, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Slovak, Serbian and Ukrainian. (For further details, please visit http://www.mozilla.org/projects/l10n/mlp_status.html).

Mozilla 1.0 is available for free download at: http://www.mozilla.org. For additional information on Mozilla 1.0, please visit mozilla.org for the Mozilla 1.0 Guide.

Mozilla will celebrate the release of Mozilla 1.0 with a party at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco at 8pm on Wednesday, June 12, 2002. Details are available at http://mozilla.org/party/2002/flyer.html.

Additional parties are also being planned by Mozilla participants at 126 locations worldwide. Information on these parties can be found at: http://www.schnitzer.at/mozparty/

About Mozilla.org

Mozilla.org (www.mozilla.org) is the group that exists to make Mozilla a successful open source project; it supports the entire Mozilla community. Mozilla.org provides a central point of contact and community for those interested in using or improving the Mozilla code base. Mozilla.org provides Open-Source Internet client software that includes a browser, mail and news functionality, and a toolkit for developing Web-based applications. Mozilla's code is designed for performance and portability, features industry-leading standards-support, and makes extensive use of XUL (Extensible User-interface Language) as an easy-to-use interface programming tool. Mozilla.org receives code and contributions from both individual volunteers and from commercial entities which use Mozilla code as a foundation for product releases. Mozilla.org was founded by Netscape Communications Corporation.